


four dreams in a row

by sunburst



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Fraternity, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Arson, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, references to Greek mythology, seokgyu are 2 himbos being gay and doing crimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:47:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27694378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunburst/pseuds/sunburst
Summary: Seokmin asks, like it’s the very first time he’s considering it, “Think it’ll burn?”“Why not,” Mingyu says. “Anything can.”
Relationships: Kim Mingyu/Lee Seokmin | DK
Comments: 18
Kudos: 60
Collections: SVTOXIC FEST 2020





	four dreams in a row

**Author's Note:**

> In response to the prompt:  
> Fraternity brothers who commit arson together stay together.
> 
> \- [the frat boys in question](https://miingyu.tumblr.com/post/620212171178229760/two-very-different-things-are-happening-here)
> 
> \- obviously arson is bad, Do Not do it! this is pure fiction and i don't condone any of it. accordingly, content warning for fire and descriptions of a house burning down, a brief implied panic attack, and some slight blood + alcohol. takes place in america bc greek system
> 
> \- thank you to m for encouraging me when i felt stuck!
> 
> \- sponsored by Sylvia Plath, Firesong— 
> 
> Brave love, dream  
> not of staunching such strict flame

I: When Day Approached

Born green we were, to this flawed garden. It follows, then, that Seokmin’s innocent theory about Dumbassery and Orpheus actually runs through the whole story, beginning-to-finish. Even though Mingyu only hears it a week before the night at the end of things. 

So, set the scene. Spring semester, sophomore year. Mingyu and Seokmin are taking Classics 100. This has nothing to do with either of their majors, which are film and musical theatre respectively. They’re in it for four reasons. 

1\. Easy units. 

2\. They’re in the Greek system, so in learning about Ancient Greek literature they’re embodying a kind of pun, or, at least, a sort of pathetic joke to be tossed out at parties. 

3\. Seokmin is still obsessed with Percy Jackson.

4\. Seokmin is also auditioning for the mid-semester musical, which happens to be something about Greek myths. So he has it in his head that he’ll be Orpheus. 

“That’s perfect for you,” Mingyu told him when he found out. All hopeful and naive, he thought to himself privately. Seokmin said he figured the class might help him learn more about his character. 

Funnily enough, Seokmin gets cast as Eurydice, which is something neither of them can quite figure. Plus the course turns out to be much harder than expected. Case in point: the midterm essay, on Virgil’s version of the Orpheus myth. You how it went down— Eurydice dies, Orpheus goes down into the Underworld to bring her back. He’s ordered not to turn around and look at her, Or Else. And just when they’re almost out of the woods, guess what this fucker does? He turns and looks. Like a dumbass. Explain that!

Seokmin is not dissuaded. He, with his natural enthusiastic conviction, thinks his idea is a great one. It goes: 

If you, like, think about it, it’s all kind of a metaphor, dude. It’s really only about why people do stupid things. Things they know will end up in smoke. So maybe Orpheus only turned around cause Eurydice called to him, and he was willing to take the punishment if it meant seeing her as she was. As in, briefly alive.

We’re all willing to do stupid things if it means we can see each other that way and remember it. Right? 

He gets a C on his essay. 

Mingyu sticks to a preapproved analysis and gets an A-, cause contrary to what the common expectation round the frat is, he can be pretty shrewd at select times. And he’s kind of a perfectionist. So.

“That,” Seokmin says from the foot of Mingyu’s bed, “is bullshit.”

There are still faint rings of blue-purple-red around both his eyes from the Chan Birthday Incident, although the splint on his nose came off a week ago. The fading bruises and his put-upon expression are, when taken together, a mildly moody cast. It’s a brand new look for someone like Seokmin— he who had to take a special workshop last semester on Acting Angry and/or Mopey just to be able to expand his repertoire of things he could audition for. His musical is premiering tonight, and the bruises pose a slight problem. Mingyu bought him a tiny tube of concealer from CVS. He’s planning to sort of leave it on Seokmin’s bed as a nice thoughtful surprise.

“Why didn’t you just stick to the regular interpretation,” he says when Seokmin keeps frowning and shifting from foot to foot.

“Which one?

“Like— the one about Virgil thinking Orpheus going into the Underworld and turning around was actually a bad thing? Like he wasn’t actually meant to do that?”

“Jeonghan said—”

“Listen to yourself.”

“You wanna get slapped by this?” Seokmin half-heartedly flaps his essay like it’s a fly-swatter. Performing Angry and/or Mopey. “College is a scam, anyways.” 

“Being in a frat is a scam, too. But here you are. What do you think that says about you? About, like, your morals?”

In response Seokmin groans and starfishes onto the bed facedown like he wants to smother himself. The old bandaid on his elbow flaps half-loose from his dramatics. Its origin is either from that time last week he got a little too hyped during rage cage and absolutely bashed his arm on the edge of the table, or from when he tried to do a trick on Hansol’s board and wiped out in front of the newly initiated recruits. 

Mingyu was trying to film the whole thing on his phone, but when Seokmin didn’t so much fall as throw himself down onto the pavement, he had to go running after the board down the Sig Tau driveway, skate video be damned. Upon returning he found Hansol inspecting the damage on Seokmin with his unique mixture of serious concern and barely contained laughter, Chan and Seungkwan hysterical in the background. Every time Chan saw Seokmin in the days after he wheeled his arms around like a car wash balloon man and repeated what Seokmin had screamed while going down. Which was, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

Which is fucking hilarious, and kind of sad, and a good encapsulation of Seokmin as a person.

Mingyu reaches over and peels the bandaid all the way off. Only the sticky imprint around the scab is left behind.

“Thanks!”

“Yeah.” He thinks about maybe telling Seokmin to keep trying to voice his frustrations, even if it twists and turns and circles around the real main point of it. But Seokmin moves at the speed of light.

“Listen, I was in the garage looking for Josh’s old guitar picks, and I saw this thing.”

“Why were you looking for guitar picks in the garage?”

He shrugs. “Not important. But this thing. You know what it looked like?”

“What?”

“Just this big brown bottle. But when I opened it, it smelled like gasoline.”

A little unexpectedly clear-eyed. Might as well roll with it. 

“If I didn’t know better,” Mingyu says carefully, “I’d say you were right.”

Seokmin stares at him, cheek squished against a pillow. He has this funny face on, sort of thoughtful, caught between expressions. 

“Whatcha thinking?”

“Gyu,” he says. Deflecting. “Isn’t that my beanie?”

Mingyu’s been practicing his own version of stubborn naivete, even if he doesn’t wear it quite as easy and natural as Seokmin. “Course not. It’s mine.”

“You sure? I’m always losing shit these days.” 

“I’m sure,” Mingyu says. He feels a laugh creeping up and frowns to dissuade it. “I tell you when I borrow your shit.”

“Not always, you don’t.”

“It’s not yours. Honest to god, I’ve never lied once in my life.”

“Right. Of course.” 

Well, all right, there had been that time with the nice plaid coat, which was actually maybe Minghao’s to begin with, given its elegance, but had somehow found its way to Seokmin’s closet. Then it went mysteriously missing until Mingyu slipped up and accidentally wore it to Classics one morning. Seokmin had his theater performance workshop right before, so Mingyu always saved him a seat. When he slid into the adjacent desk he took the coffee Mingyu handed him then did a dramatic double-take. He side-eyed Mingyu and the coat periodically the rest of the hour, suppressing his smile.

But he let Mingyu keep it, in the end.

Now, though, he wants to protest. Mingyu can tell from the little curl of his mouth. Seokmin laughs his soft throaty laugh, the one he gives when he’s in a particularly generous mood, which, granted, is fairly often. Then his hands shoot forward to try and grab Mingyu’s beanie right up from his staticky hair. Well, Seokmin’s beanie. _Their_ beanie? They slap each others’ arms around a bit, dancing and dramatic, like sloppy amateur boxers. Seokmin miraculously comes out on top. The ultimate betrayal. He sits back on his haunches, ignoring the loud complaints, and pulls the hat onto his head, ears poking out from the sides.

His essay is forgotten on Mingyu’s bed. All those careful lines abandoned. His theory does not hold and has been cast aside for more immediate dumbassery.

“So,” Seokmin says. 

The smile on his face renews itself like a page turning. He has so many smiles. A rolodex of them. Mingyu knows most by heart, the smiles for joy, for sadness, for fondness, for apprehension. 

Seokmin swipes his tongue across his lips a few times the way he does when he’s stalling. He isn’t quite looking at Mingyu. Nervous sort of avoidance. 

“Gasoline,” he prompts. “In the garage?”

Mingyu wonders how anyone could call Seokmin an idiot. 

Well— he supposes the problem is that fifty percent of the time Seokmin is joyfully clueless, but the other fifty he knows much more than he lets on. He’s good at blithely pretending. 

No, not pretending. Hiding himself in nervous energy, in dumb distractions. How do you know when a suggestion is intentional? How do you know when it’s not? How do you know when you should chase it down and pull it towards you and say, Seokmin, are we on the same page here?

“We’re hosting the afterparty for your musical tonight, remember,” Mingyu says, in lieu of a true answer to the question. “I heard all the Phi Delts are invited.”

Seokmin’s grin drops.

“Alright,” he says. 

Mingyu waits for him to say something else. Instead, distractedly, Seokmin grabs his essay and tears a page out from the staple. He folds it up into neat eighths so it’s a tiny slip of almost nothing. 

“Stupid idea,” he says softly at no one in particular, and Mingyu doesn’t know if he’s referring to the gasoline or to Dumbassery and Orpheus. He reaches over for the matchbook on Mingyu’s side table, strikes one, then holds it close to the tiny thick sliver. He burns the paper silently. There's a furrow of frustration in his forehead, a tautness in his arms, an almost-hunch of his shoulders as he stares at the charred page until the black smolder almost reaches his fingers. 

Then he shakes it out and instantly relaxes, like a line cut loose. He looks up and laughs, probably at Mingyu’s face. 

“See you at the show,” he says. 

We’re trying not to be Icarus, his eyes say. Don’t let our wings be made of wax. 

Seokmin leaves the small burnt stub of the paper on the side table next to the matchbook. Mingyu brings it to his nose and sniffs. It smells almost sweet.

  
  
  


“You hear the one about the quickest way to feel alive?”

Mingyu meets Seokmin for the very first time rushing Sig Tau freshman year. In the small dawn hours immediately afterward, he has a prophetic vision, blackout drunk when he falls asleep, dead cold sober when he dreams. 

He knows because he remembers everything when he wakes up, the image still suspended above him like a mirage in the desert, burned into his retinas like the sun itself. 

In his dream, Mingyu is running down a lightless street, feet thudding soundlessly on the pavement. He can’t remember why he’s running. Only that he needs to keep going. His legs kick. His chest expands and contracts, gasping air that feels fuzzy and tangible, made from smoke. He can’t see in front of his face, can’t see what he’s running towards, but he imagines he is trying to approach daylight.

Then someone calls into the silence. A bright loud voice like a bell, like the first word that has ever been spoken into the universe is— 

“Mingyu.” 

Dream-him stops in his tracks like his feet have melted into liquid asphalt then solidified cold. 

“Mingyu—” 

He turns to look over his shoulder, sees all the light in the universe concentrated into a house on fire in the middle of the goddamn road. Black fringed beams where walls once stretched, the grey tulle smoke fading into nothing, the orange pulsating and embryonic against the black sky, like the ego birth of the night. 

And in front of the house on fire is Seokmin. Smiling.

Something about that face. Easy radiance, the kind you can’t practice. Gotta have it on the inside.

  
  
  
  


“I,” Seokmin says, “can do magic.”

Seokmin is a lightweight. Of course he is. They’re freshmen, they have the right to be lightweights. 

One of the Sig Tau brothers, Jihoon, doesn’t drink. He says there are lots of kinds of drinkers. Those who sleep, those who cry, those who get pissed, those who leave. 

Then there’s Seokmin, who seems to put on a sort of exuberant performance. Or, at least, extends the one he is permanently acting in out of his own volition. In Seokmin’s version of the script, the world is a kind of allegory and he is not the main character but is, rather, a very memorable comic relief. Mingyu thinks this version is wrong.

As proof, here Seokmin is in the center of the universe, sitting cross-legged on his tiny dorm room twin bed, back straight, eyes wide. The lights in his room are the color-changing kind; he demonstrated with the remote for a solid three minutes when they first stumbled inside. Now the lights are blue, waterlike, dreamy. He looks weirdly ethereal under them. His sweatdamp hair is all in his face. Mingyu, up on his knees, fixes his bangs for him as he talks, brushing them away from his forehead. 

“Mingyu Kim," Seokmin says, "I’m using your full name. That’s how fucking serious I am about this.”

“Really. You can do magic.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re so fucking drunk, dude. I’m glad your roommate’s home for the weekend.”

“Do you want to see the magic or not!” 

“Okay, fine.” 

Mingyu tucks the last of Seokmin’s hair into place, sits back with patience he doesn’t really recognize. They’ve only known each other for a month now, and most of their time together has been spent rushing Sig Tau, but it goes fast, discovering Seokmin. Feels like by all rights he should exhaust you earlier, only anytime he dims, it makes you feel guilty. You end up wanting desperately for him to burn on, tireless, endless, sunbright. 

So much about himself that Mingyu didn’t know before he was helplessly enveloped in Seokmin’s warmth. Such as: yes, actually Mingyu is perfectly fine and willing to half-carry a drunk and very clingy boy all the way to a distant dormitory, regardless of the fact that his own warm waiting bedroom is all the way across campus in the older building and he has Intro to Screenwriting at eight in the morning. 

Or: normally, Mingyu is the kind of person who lets idiots feel the full consequences of their actions, especially idiots who are rushing a frat. You should be able to hold your alcohol if you have those kinda grand plans. But it’s almost impossible to disappoint Seokmin if it’s not in a joking way, and the Sig Tau brothers seem, well— forgiving. Seungcheol had actually offered to down Seokmin’s drinks for him, his eyes widening after he said it like he was unknowingly betraying his own facade to reveal his soft heart. All for Seokmin.

And: if Mingyu had been the ultra-lightweight, he feels certain Seokmin would have been unflinchingly generous. Would’ve stayed up the whole night for him. 

Part of him scoffs at that. Part of him admires it.

“Let’s see it, then,” he says, giving way.

“Okay! Now we’re talking, baby!” 

In that endless enthusiasm, Seokmin grabs Mingyu by the hands and pulls him close so their thighs are touching. Seokmin on the outside, bracketing Mingyu inside of him. Mingyu can’t quite linger on the feeling— warmth, a little too much— because Seokmin insists, “Close your eyes.” 

Without bothering to check if Mingyu follows the instructions— he doesn’t— Seokmin digs in his hoodie pocket then flourishes something in his open palm.

“Et voila!”

“Sorry, is that— a Zippo?”

“Not just any Zippo. It’s my magical Zippo.”

“Man, this is surreal,” Mingyu groans. “Was that it? Was that your trick? Pulling a lighter out of your pocket?”

“Oh, ye of little faith! Watch.”

Seokmin’s face kind of shifts. His eyes become difficult to read. A dimple appears beneath his mouth, tiny evidence of concentration. 

He wields the matte red lighter between his long slender fingers with surprising ease. He uses his thumb to flick the hinge open and spins it around his hand, thumb-to-pinky and back, clicks it shut, repeats. The metallic clinks settle into a steady rhythm, easy as breathing, lighter as small live bird, as string of fate, as cat’s cradle in kinetic motion. A blur of bloodred real-live magic. All thanks to Seokmin’s deceptive cleverness. 

Mingyu is kind of startled into genuine awe. “What the fuck, you’re so good with that thing! Like it’s a butterfly knife or something.”

“I practice,” Seokmin says, grinning. “Watch. This is the magic! Ready?”

He flips the Zippo open again, then flicks it alive. Then, with his other hand, he pinches the blue-white at its base, jerks his hand up above the lighter quickly and folds it into a fist. The flame disappears. It looks like he’s palmed it, like he’s cupping the fire in his hand like a tiny animal. Then he throws his fingers down, splaying them, and, for all intents and purposes, the flame leaps back into the lighter from his very being. 

Like he’s Prometheus, and the Zippo is the Earth.

“Holy shit. How’d you learn to do that?”

“Youtube,” Seokmin says, very pleased at the reaction. 

Mingyu is silent for a minute, staring down at the lighter. The only noise is Seokmin’s cheap little fan snuffling in the corner. The blue glow of the small room is trancelike and sticky. Subaquatic. Everything blurs. 

“Burning things,” Mingyu says eventually.

“Huh?”

“The quickest way to feel alive.”

“Oh!” Then, “I’ve never really— I mean. I just kind of— I like playing around with the lighter. So, yeah. Not with the…”

“With the actual fire,” Mingyu finishes.

“Yeah...”

Just forget it. Just say goodnight and head home. But he looks up, and there’s Seokmin, inches away, staring at him. His lips parted slightly. Moth hooked into lantern. 

“Once when I was little,” Mingyu says in what he hopes is a light casual voice, “I burned down an old shed.”

Seokmin’s voice is almost reverent when he asks, “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I dunno.” He chances meeting Seokmin’s eyes again and it turns somehow into full-on heady drinking, sticky like flypaper. “I stole my dad’s matchbook. I lit a match. I remember the smell. It was weird, kind of gritty. I, um, liked the way it smelled.”

“And then?”

“Then I... I held it up to a wall of the shed and I watched the flame kind of, like, dance, like water, and it jumped from the match… and then I used three more matches, and then the whole thing was on fire. I felt this thing, standing there watching it eat itself. Like— like a deep sigh in my chest. A good feeling.”

“A good feeling,” Seokmin echoes.

“That’s the way it was in the past. People lit forests on fire, and then planted seeds. Burning down stuff so they could make new life.”

“Huh.”

This is stupid. They should stop talking about it. 

“I kind of wanted to stick my hand in it,” he confesses almost on accident.

Seokmin asks, voice low, “You wanted to touch the fire?”

“Yeah. Or…or taste it.”

“Taste it,” Seokmin repeats, his expression inscrutable.

“Yes.” 

It feels like they should be whispering. They’ve cornered themselves into a kind of high-stakes staring contest. First one to look away dies or some shit. 

Mingyu stares at Seokmin, so serious, so close and warm, thighs still pressing into his. He feels his face growing hot for some reason he can’t entirely account for. Funny that a way to describe a blush might be, _My face was on fire._

And now Seokmin is holding the lighter up without looking away from Mingyu’s eyes. He flicks it open at the hinge. His thumb presses, and there’s that slow animal hiss of butane. His other hand reaches up to rest on Mingyu’s jaw. His thumb brushes Mingyu’s bottom lip, and then he pulls down. 

Mingyu’s mouth opens slightly. Giving way again, as if entirely on accident. 

The flame comes closer to his lips, and he tries to read Seokmin’s expression, which is kind of scared and also thrilled, like they are about to commit a great crime together. His tongue feels freezing and hot and wet all at the same time. He can see the blue and orange gleaming in Seokmin’s eyes. 

Seokmin has such dark eyes. They are strangely Stygian right now, those eyes. 

“Hey,” Mingyu whispers, keeping himself still, trying to break through a strange dazed crossfaded reverie. A spiral to the center. Because if one of them doesn’t say it, who knows. He tries to say, This isn’t Jennifer’s Body, ha ha, let’s just take a breather, yeah? But instead what comes out is, “What do you want?”

Seokmin blinks. The spell cracks.

“Dunno.”

He flips the lighter closed with his thumb. His flame dissipates into oblivion. He’s breathing hard, still staring, his eyes roaming over Mingyu’s face like he is seeing him anew. As if he has just discovered he is capable of being the one at fault.

His hand still on Mingyu’s face, cupping his cheekbone.

“Sorry,” Seokmin whispers. 

For once in his life, he doesn’t quite look it.

Mingyu’s stomach is in free-fall like the bed beneath them has collapsed into oblivion. He hears his own harsh breathing, the same as Seokmin’s, like something is sticking in their throats, like they have to consciously remind themselves of the need for oxygen.

“What are we burning up for so bad,” Mingyu says.

“I don’t know.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know!”

“Me either.”

Is fire something humans invented? It must be. All things of such heat and starving stupidity are invented by humans. 

Mingyu crashes forward and tastes tequila and for some reason honey lemon tea. The metal touch of the lighter still in Seokmin’s hand is freezing against his jaw. He grips Seokmin’s hair in strange seizing desperation and pulls him close, closer, ends up down on the bed, almost all the way beneath Seokmin, making noises into his mouth, possessed by a compulsive desire to swallow whole. His mind is a pleasant buzz and every inch of his skin is alight and singing.

Seokmin breaks away when neither of them can breathe anymore. His arms caging Mingyu’s head, his breathing shivery. He rests his forehead against Mingyu’s, nose to nose, a string of silver spit between their mouths. Like they’re fighters facing off. 

“Slow down,” he pleads, his eyes squeezed shut, kind of laughing. 

Some odd heat pricking at the corner of Mingyu’s eyes, like an exhale of relief. 

They both try to follow Seokmin’s well-intentioned advice. Thing is, neither of them are very good at delaying the inevitable. 

  
  
  
  


The room is cast in red emergency lighting. Like if under the ocean laid another deeper sea of blood. Snatches of faces pass and revolve like he’s on a lazy carousel.

He feels perfectly still somehow. The world orbits, and across the room there’s Seokmin, steady at the center of it.

Sometimes it feels like everyone else is already in the middle of fading away. Like bad background actors. Ashes on the wind. That leaves the two of them to be the only people alive. Really alive. Mingyu watching tense and ready like both the hunter and the hunted. Seokmin’s face glimmering.

Like they are in the Underworld, and he is the only living source of heat.

  
  
  
  


II: The Jaws of Taenarus

“What’re you thinking about,” he pries, kicking at Seokmin’s ratty converse. “Come on, Seokminnie.”

“Since when do you call me that?”

“I always wanted to. All of last year. It’s kinda cute. It fits you. Right?”

Seokmin huffs grudgingly. Sometimes he keeps it to himself when he thinks something’s bullshit. Or he says it like a joke, making his eyes go too wide, like, Ha-ha, Seokmin has an opinion, but he’s just kidding, actually, it’s all good!

“Seok. You can’t pull shit past me, dude. What happened?”

“Nothing.”

Seokmin's sitting on the curb all folded into himself and hugging his knees, trying to be a smaller animal inside his flimsy bomber jacket. There are boxes scattered around. He’s paused in the process of moving into the Sig Tau house. They haven’t actually been assigned rooms yet; it’s going to be a whole big thing in the living room later. Mingyu’s heard some shit about rock-paper-scissors, which, like, no way that’s the smartest method for assigning that many guys their rooms.

He catches Seokmin looking across the street. At the Phi Delt house, the assholes.

“Phi Delt fuckers said something?” Mingyu guesses.

Seokmin only shrugs. Mingyu kicks at his shoes again. This time he connects, but Seokmin’s foot only flops sadly to one side.

Okay. A little gentleness and tact might be required. 

Mingyu sits down on the curb and looks at Seokmin, at the straight slope of his nose, the late August sun painting his face gentle as ever despite the hard hurt of his stare.

“What did they say?”

“Just- just dumb shit,” Seokmin says almost meekly, like the words are being dragged out of him. “About like, whatever. One of them came to open auditions for the fall musical and I heard them saying something about my singing. I’m just, like, kind of sensitive about that stuff, I guess?”

He says it like it’s a question. He scrubs at his face. 

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Sorry. This is stupid.”

In his head, Mingyu catalogs all the ways Seokmin apologizes. So sorry, man, I’m really fucking sorry, sorry, seriously, I’m stupid, this is stupid, my fault, sorry for everything, sorry for all of it.

He wonders what it would take for anyone to do something really worth that much apology. “You’re too good of a person,” he says.

That soft laugh, ready to break, a rubber band stretched too thin. 

“Hey, man, I gotta be. I balance things out and all.”

“You don’t always have to be that.”

“Is this some great Mingyu Wisdom you’re imparting to me right now?”

“Yes.” He uses a sleeve of his sweatshirt to mop Seokmin’s damp chin. “You should listen to it.”

“I’m at this point,” he says, turning to look at Mingyu, his teary eyes still full of his persistent sweetness, “where I feel like I’m going to do something really stupid. I’m trying so hard to keep my balance. One day I’m going to fall on one side or the other. It’ll hurt either way.”

Mingyu makes a noncommittal noise and keeps wiping at the tear tracks on his face and his pink nose, feeling something hurt and warm inside of him when Seokmin doesn’t jerk away, just keeps perfectly still. 

Maybe Seokmin does know enough. Maybe he knows the whole story. Maybe he’s choosing for himself, is all. 

But maybe he needs Mingyu. Some people stoke the furnace their whole lives. Some people are waiting for more fuel.

  
  
  
  


“Shut up,” Mingyu mutters, licking his lips. “You’re always so _fucking_ loud.”

“You shut up,” Seokmin whines nonsensically, and it comes out sounding like he kind of enjoys Mingyu telling him off. 

In the crackling darkness their breathing is uneven and the world is tactile, lurid, each moment dilated and sweaty. It almost feels like they’re wrestling. All tense and wound up, feeling like they’re not supposed to be doing this, whatever this is. But they went out and got drunk and came back together, and it sort of just happened. 

It happens like this a lot, maybe every other week, has been happening for almost two years. It happens like they shower together under the pretense of saving water and time, messing around until it turns into something entirely different. It happens like Mingyu spends nights in Seokmin’s room after parties, just like that time at the beginning of freshman year, and then he spends nights in Seokmin’s room without parties to stand as a pretense.

It happens like the other Sig Tau brothers sometimes look at them with this knowing smile, but then it becomes a fact of everyone’s life— Seokmin-and-Mingyu, never one without the other. It happens like they themselves don’t really have to explain it or name it. It happens like dead wood catching life. Slowly then everything.

Mingyu presses a hand over Seokmin’s mouth for a few difficult long seconds, as a reminder that seriously, Soonyoung is just next door, and even though he definitely fully knows what’s up by now, there’s a kind of fun in pretending. In good acting.

Then he goes back to the task beneath him. He slips the waistband of Seokmin’s sweatpants down again and mouths at the warmth of his inner thigh, drags his teeth against the soft sticky skin. It’s enough to make Seokmin jerk, a little bit, his breath hitching. One of his hands tangles into Mingyu’s hair like he wants to pull. Mingyu feels the metal ring on his pinky finger scrape against his neck. 

Oddly enough the hot thing inside Mingyu wants Seokmin to pull, wants to feel the cold ring press tight into him. But Seokmin is, as always, a little too tender. 

Mingyu bites down on his thigh, hard, then dips down, then deeper, until he can feel heat and tightness and all of Seokmin at the back of his throat. Seokmin makes a kind of sharp pleading noise, loud and whining. His fingers curl sharply into Mingyu’s hair hard enough to make Mingyu’s eyes squeeze shut, and he produces an equally incoherent sound instead of surfacing and saying, Shut up, dude, are you trying to get us caught? I mean— am I?

But it’s okay, because Seokmin covers his own mouth with a palm, a little too late, and lets out a soft stressed huff. Mingyu emerges with a slick noise of his mouth, stares at Seokmin beneath him all desperate and panting, and for a minute, it looks like things might be fine. 

Then someone knocks on the door.

“The walls are fucking thin and I have a fucking midterm at eight you fucking assholes.” 

Soonyoung.

Seokmin breaks up into laughter, sweetly embarrassed. Mingyu reluctantly hovers still watching his face, kind of tries to slip a hand back down beneath his waistband. But Seokmin shakes his head and makes an unseemingly cute face, like, Better luck next time.

“It’s okay. My fault,” he says.

“Fine.”

Mingyu is suddenly exhausted, like a match burnt to a cinereal husk. Too tired to even roll away. He tries to make himself a little smaller, rests his head on the oddly broad and comforting expanse of Seokmin’s chest. When did Seokmin start to actually, like, work out, again? Seokmin starts to pet Mingyu’s hair. It’s kind of funny at first because the last time he touched his hair, as in, before the whole pulling thing just now, was maybe a week ago. He was being a little asshole, mocking the whole Mingyu-trying-to-look-cool thing.

But now there’s no play-acting. His hands are deliberate, lingering. He hums one of the songs from his precious Orpheus musical as he tends to his task like he’s tending to a hearth. Mingyu feels the vibrations against his cheek. He closes his eyes and breathes. The early spring rain drums gently on the roof. Seokmin’s fingers brush against his forehead and the tips of his ears, steady, the warmth so present and enormous.

He figures he’ll never forget these few seconds. When he closes his eyes weeks, months later, he’ll still be holding them against his entire body. He’ll still hear Seokmin humming. He’ll still feel Seokmin’s hands sifting through his hair. He could live forever like this. Just him and Seokmin. Fitting inside each other the way fire cups the thing it burns.

But then that line of thought starts to feel unsettled, like a smokescreen. Something he can’t quite touch or see. Something yet to be fully embodied.

Mingyu props himself up with an elbow on Seokmin’s chest and looks around the familiar room instead of thinking. This is the bedroom that he himself was supposed to be assigned to last semester. Only Seokmin had been too nice when the whole frat did their rock-paper-scissors shit and basically relegated himself to a shoebox for all of sophomore year.

For some reason, they usually end up in this room together instead of Mingyu’s. Something comforting about its Seokmin-ness. It’s mostly bare, save a poster of Jekyll and Hyde of the gothic musical thriller persuasion taped above the headboard, edges curling up sadly. The acoustic guitar Seokmin got off Facebook Marketplace freshman year then never touched since leans against the wall. The room smells like that honey lemon tea he’s always drinking for his voice. As if he needs anything extra to keep it pretty. His skin smells like it too, sweet and sharp, like if Mingyu licked his neck, it would be hot enough to burn his tongue. 

Seokmin reaches up and takes Mingyu’s hand. Seokmin's hands are smaller, prettier somehow, which Mingyu has noticed plenty of times before in the last two years. Times even later or earlier, times when Mingyu was the one underneath losing it more than just a little. Between those gentle fingers, he has strangely sometimes felt like an overeager puppy already full-grown, yet to realize the significance and breadth of his own self. 

Seokmin pokes the little blue bandaid on Mingyu’s palm. They study each other, noses inches apart. The silver chain of Mingyu’s necklace is hanging down and brushing Seokmin’s collarbone, like a thread connecting them. 

He wonders what Seokmin sees. What he’s thinking. He doesn’t have to wonder long, because Seokmin will always reveal himself.

“You bite your nails a lot,” Seokmin says. Just noticing, never passing much judgment. He pokes the bandaid again. “What happened here, huh?” 

“Um— burned myself cooking, I guess,” Mingyu lies. 

In reality, he’d been playing with matches out on the rickety fire escape during a party a few nights ago. Seokmin was at rehearsals for his musical. So no one had been there to ask him, big-eyed and joking, Dude, what’re you doing, do you wanna go burn something outside or what? No one had been there to get super serious afterward, tell him to run his hand under freezing water even though that would be the wrong thing to do, and then finally dissolve into giggles at the whole thing, much too forgiving.

Seokmin tsks and shakes his head. “Clumsy, clumsy,” he whispers, then closes his eyes and presses his mouth to the bandaid.

“Are you going to remember this?” Mingyu asks. His voice sounds like dry kindling. “Here? Us?”

“Of course.”

“How do you know?”

“I can’t help it,” Seokmin says.

  
  
  
  


There’s always been a wound in his chest. One time he read that if you get stabbed in the heart, you aren’t supposed to pull the blade out. You keep the quiet blood close to you. You let it fester and eat you with its soft flame until it loves you just as much as you love it.

Seokmin walks towards him, then past him, and when their shoulders brush the air bristles with silent static. Mingyu turns and follows, into the cramped and dark garage. Seokmin lifts the brown bottle of gasoline. A black scrap of cloth hangs from its mouth. He cradles it in both his arms. Then they’re outside, out of Sig Tau and into the waiting embrace of the night. The sky a slumbering stretch of navy before a comet arrives, like the yawn of an empty stage. 

He’d follow Seokmin anywhere. Sun-and-chariot reversed, especially where there should be no sun-and-chariot. That’s what they are, the two of them. That’s their role here.

  
  
  
  


III: Coming to the Upper Air

The thing is that Seokmin had a part in the spring musical last year, too. His first lead role. He was perfect on opening night, and when he took the bouquet of roses from Mingyu backstage his eyes were shining prismatic. He hugged Mingyu and said into his shoulder, “I think this is the best day of my life.” 

But then at the afterparty in one of the older castmate’s apartments, at some point he simply disappeared. Like a column of smoke. When Mingyu went looking, he found Seokmin sitting on the ground in the add-on bathroom, not throwing up or anything, just sitting there and kind of shivering, probably very drunk but also dead cold serious. 

Mingyu half-carried him to one of the bedrooms. Seokmin sat there on the bed and shook like he wasn’t aware there was anyone else in the room with him, kind of crying but mostly just shivering. Mingyu was silent for a little bit because he thought it was better to try and be sensitive. But he’d never been a patient person, and he wasn’t entirely sure what was happening, and finally his frustration won out and he told Seokmin he wanted to know what, exactly, was wrong.

“I made a mistake,” Seokmin said. “I heard them talking about it.”

“What mistake? Who was talking about it?”

“One of my solos,” he said, and then he wouldn’t elaborate further. He kept shivering. He still had on his stage makeup. It had gone all sullied and sad, streaking down his face unevenly. When Mingyu pushed his wet bangs out of his mascara-sodden eyes he shuddered in the glare of the bedroom lights and said, as if startled, “It’s so cold, it’s so fucking cold.”

If he could've, Mingyu would have gone outside and scavenged around for pieces of firewood and built Seokmin a bonfire to help him stop feeling whatever he was feeling. But he didn’t know how to. Instead, he held him for a few long minutes until eventually Seokmin stopped shaking, having learned that he’d had a source of heat inside of himself all along. 

And anyways since then Mingyu has learned that building a bonfire is a two-person crime. 

  
  
  
  


Frat boys are at their best-or-maybe-worst very late at night, when things are absurd and mostly stop making sense. It’s Chan’s birthday. Initially, it was supposed to be a little intra-frat thing, but of course some people— as in, Jeonghan— realized you could use such an event as an excuse to sort of go all out. So subsequently it turned into a whole goddamn Panhellenic event.

All the Phi Delt assholes showed up, and Seokmin spectacularly beat all of their sorry asses at a game of sevens. He’s long been ridiculous when he wins, like the force of his enthusiasm short-circuits him. At some point those undiluted celebrations started riling up Bobby-something from Phi Delt. And, well, in the end, what happened was Bobby-something maintains he’d meant to punch the wall, but instead missed and managed to end up socking Seokmin right in his perfect nose. Seokmin flailed backward with a little cry, and when his fingers came away from his face they were scarlet-tipped and everything went quiet and frozen for a few horrid seconds.

“I’m fine,” he says thickly. Mingyu has managed to make him sit down on the grimed up bathroom floor. He sounds like he’s trying very hard to keep from crying. He keeps tilting his head forward and then back against the stall door, feet slack on either side of the base of the toilet. 

Mingyu kneels next to him, trying to make him cooperate. “Hold still.”

“It’s okay, it’s fine, it’s okay. Sorry you had to come in here and help. Does it look too bad? Why do we do this shit?”

“Which shit?”

“Sevens, getting too drunk, making idiots of ourselves?”

“Some real food for thought. Maybe later, though, hold still please—”

“Ow!” 

“Jesus, did he fucking break your nose or something?”

“Oh no.” Seokmin actually does sort of start to cry, much to Mingyu’s horror. “Did he? Oh my god. We’re premiering in two weeks, no no no—”

“Calm down! You’re fine, it’s gonna be fine. I’ll go get masking tape. Keep your head down, make sure the blood’s dripping into the toilet, okay?”

When Mingyu comes back with tape and cotton, Seokmin is doing the exact opposite. His head is tilted back in desperation, and his fingers and the front of his shirt are bloodied scarlet. His legs keep moving, knees knocking together then out against the stall doors, unable to stop.

“Of course you ignored me.”

He kneels again, pushes Seokmin’s hair out of his eyes, tilts his head down.

“Okay. Listen up. I’m gonna tape your nose up and then we’re going to the hospital.”

“Do I have to?” Only it comes out, “Do I hab do?” 

“Are you insane? Yes, you have to.”

“But like if I don’t go to the hospital, technically I win the fight. Right? Above the flying guy...above...uh...”

“Above the person running is the person flying,” Wonwoo says from outside the stall. 

“Yeah. That!”

“Everything okay in there? Bleeding stopped yet?”

“He keeps tipping his head back and swallowing the blood,” Mingyu complains. “He won’t listen to me at all. It’s ridiculous.”

“Let me know if you need help.”

“No, it’s fine— ”

“I would like,” Seokmin says, spitting out another mouthful of red onto the bathroom tiles, “to be taken seriously. I think it would be nice.”

“Seokmin, light of my life, I need you to shut up for two seconds.” 

“Sounds like you have it handled,” Wonwoo says, bemused.

“Yes! It’s fucking fine! It’s all good!”

True to his fastidious and overly determined nature, Mingyu finally gets the tape onto Seokmin’s nose. He even gets around to using a wad of cheaply thin toilet paper to mop up his bloodied chin and some of his shirt. 

By the time it’s finished, Seokmin’s nervous buzzed adrenaline seemingly runs thin. He thunks his head back against the stall door, slightly frowning, mostly dazed. 

“You look like the kid at the end of Hereditary,” Mingyu says, and snorts.

“You know I was too scared to watch that,” Seokmin says tiredly. “Asshole.”

“I know. I know.”

Seokmin’s mood has decidedly shifted. Quicksilver like a coin flip. A ring of bruises is forming dark around both his eyes. He picks at a spot of dried blood on his thumb. 

Mingyu, still kneeling next to him, uses another flimsy piece of toilet paper and his spit to scrub the drying bloodstain. He squeezes Seokmin’s hand as he does it. Small reassurances of touch, of pleasant human pressure.

“Thanks,” Seokmin murmurs when the red is gone. He tilts his head up at Mingyu. His eyes going all shiny and big in the muddled bruises. “I’m an idiot. I always think too little or too much. I always end up in dumb shit.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I’m the same, we’re the same. Hey. Don’t sweat it.”

“I ruined Chan’s birthday party, huh.”

“Think it was already sorta ruined, to be fair.”

“I’m sorry. Sorry you had to come in here and fix me up. You always do.”

“It’s you,” Mingyu says softly. “I always will.”

“Why do you put up with it?”

This feels significant somehow.

He cups Seokmin’s face between his palms, hazy and worn under the shitty pale green bathroom lighting, feeling like he has something important that Seokmin needs to hear. But he can’t find the right thing to say yet, the right words to slash through the fog. He gives Seokmin’s head a good shake, says quick and loud, “This is not your fault. It’s not! Come on, let’s go, let’s get you to the hospital, okay?”

There’s one about twenty minutes walking. He had to go once with Seungkwan last semester because the freshman was convinced he was dying. Actually, it turned out he’d just gotten a little too high, but Mingyu figures the fresh air had helped.

It’ll probably help Seokmin, too. He helps hoist him up by the arms. When finally more or less upright, Seokmin kind of teeters forward into him, arms sandwiched between them, in what could loosely be defined as either a hug or a sort of vertical collapse.

Mingyu feels something damp at his collar and chooses to interpret it as the former. He wraps his arms around Seokmin’s shoulders, which he is startled to find are actually trembling a little, as if humming with pure nervous potential energy. 

“What’s wrong? Seok?”

It takes him a few seconds. He says against Mingyu’s neck, muffled and low in a choked-up voice that is hard to recognize: “It feels like something’s burning in here.”

“What?”

“I’m pissed.”

“I’d be too if I were you. No, I am, actually. I am mad.”

“I don’t want to just sit here.”

“Okay…?”

“I sort of want to do something terrible, actually. So yeah.”

“Oh?”

Oh—! 

  
  
  


IV: Even at the Confines of Light

Oh. Seokmin wants to do something bad. Mingyu follows him like a second shadow past the mess in the living room, everyone stumbling around blacked out, past the shattered mirror in the hallway. Blood spatters drying on the white fabric of Seokmin’s converse as he marches into the open air, across the empty street, beyond all the awful pounding music. Oh… how have they ended up in the Phi Delt backyard, staring at the massive letters stuck into the fire pit? Was it intentional? Oh, must’ve been.

Phi and Delta. Each letter is made out of wood, stands about ten goddamn feet tall. Waiting for them in the charcoal of the pit as if asking to be set alight.

“They’re overcompensating for something,” Mingyu says, just to cut through the weird foggy tension starting to press down. 

He can still hear the party music across the street but it feels like it’s echoing from miles above them, almost, like the two of them are somewhere deep, deep underground. The moon is nowhere to be seen. The clouds are disguising the sky into a solid wall of dark.

Seokmin asks, like it’s the very first time he’s considering it, “Think it’ll burn?”

“Why not,” Mingyu says. “Anything can.”

“I mean the, uh, letters. Not the actual building.” His teeth are chattering, probably from a combination of adrenaline and the post-midnight cold. He pats around in his pockets distractedly. “Shit. I think I left my Zippo in my room.”

“I have matches.”

Seokmin freezes, an incredulous half-smile on his face. “Sorry, but when did you start keeping matches in your pocket?”

“For a while? It's more interesting than a lighter."

"You fucking hipster." Seokmin's laugh comes sudden and sputtering and a little hysterical. Mingyu waits for him to say something else, but it doesn’t come, so he holds the matchbook out. 

Seokmin doesn’t take it.

“You wanna do the honors,” Mingyu prompts. “Or should I?”

“Maybe…maybe you should.”

What Seokmin means is that he isn’t completely ready yet. For someone with a tendency to act before he thinks he sure is taking his goddamn time with this particular descent. Mingyu remembers saying to him that one stupid time: Burning things. The quickest way to feel alive. The quickest way to feel anything. The quickest way to reduce to ash and create new life.

Alright, then. 

Now the music sounds almost like voices whispering, urging him forward. Mingyu takes a breath and strikes the match. The sound is like a wild scratch at the window. The light floating in front of his face is ghostly and beautiful, and then it warbles and nearly goes out, which is when he realizes that his hand is shaking.

He can’t quite look at Seokmin out of some strange combination of terror and desperate want. He isn’t thinking anything at all. He can’t afford to. He steps forwards and holds the match against the wooden letters. 

At first, nothing happens. The soft tan wood only chars a little dark. 

Then the fire leaps and bounds like a living thing, catching entirely within a few shallow breaths. Seokmin gasps, or maybe it’s Mingyu who makes the noise. The two letters are going up in long licks of orange flames, spitting sparks, exhaling like they’re speaking. Like they’re breathing.

Unknowingly, he's backed away from it; Seokmin takes his hand and squeezes, and Mingyu stills and turns to watch Seokmin, who is shaking so hard that Mingyu can feel it in himself like a current of sparks, and something feels so distinctly wrong and he wants to say, It should have been you, it shouldn't have been me, gods it shouldn't have—

“—is that _smoke?”_

Someone across the street. From right outside Chan’s birthday party. Some distinctly Phi Delt fucker sounding someone.

“Shit,” Mingyu hisses.

More distant yelling. Whatever bad haze they’re in comes unstuck. Punched through like a brick through a window. 

Mingyu takes off like his life depends on it, drags Seokmin by a sleeve, barely registering the way that he’s almost resistant to it at first. They gain momentum and sprint across the backlots of five more frats, space and time contracting into broken beer bottles shattered like sunbursts against the pavement, snatches of pounding aching music, party lights like blurred windows of nauseating daylight.

They reach a quiet little pocket of alley sandwiched between apartments, eerie and shadowy, and Mingyu stumbles to a stop, gasping for air, leaning against the side of the building. He turns to look at Seokmin, who is breathing just as hard if not harder.

“That felt wrong,” Mingyu says. He almost startles himself by speaking. The smell of burning wood feels permanently stuck to the roof of his mouth. “That felt—”

Seokmin pushes him back by the shoulders and kisses him hard, hard enough that Mingyu’s head bangs back against the wall and his breath jerks from the rough surprise of it. Teeth, tongue, spit, even the faint tang of blood, still wax-sticky against Seokmin’s teeth, and he trails his mouth down Mingyu’s neck and Mingyu gasps and closes his eyes and the silvery air is thick and still feels smoky and sort of like a dream with all the stars bitten out of it. When Seokmin pulls away from the small carnage of his neck he’s grinning, teeth bone-white in the night. His whole body pressed against Mingyu’s, one of his hands near Mingyu’s belt, the other at Mingyu’s face, thumbing his red wet mouth.

“Felt not big enough,” Seokmin says.

“Fuck,” Mingyu breathes, then dives forward again.

Only he’s way too eager this time, and also off target in his raw want, and their noses smash together. Seokmin goes stumbling back with a yelp, clutching at the hack tape job.

“Fuck shit I’m so sorry,” Mingyu gasps, going after him, his hands fluttering everywhere near his face. “Honest to shit, Seokmin, fuck, I’m so sorry!”

“It’s okay. It’s okay!”

“Does it hurt?”

"I think I’m ready to go to the hospital now,” Seokmin says breathily. Then he smiles. A good one this time, his eyes restored to full voltage. Thank the gods.

In their brief quiet, the angry voices grow clearer. They turn to the mouth of the alley to look over where, five backyards away, the smoke is swirling up from the back of Phi Delt like gray early morning mist turned violent and fuming. 

Mingyu watches Seokmin stare at the house for a long time, knowing that he isn’t thinking at all. He’s only watching the house, and Mingyu is watching him. His fingers twisting his necklace, the way he breathes with his whole body, how his high cheekbones cast soft indigo shadows on his bruised face, his pink mouth. 

The rabbiting of Mingyu’s heart slows, clenching tight into a hot fist of tenderness. Then a police siren screams from the void and he startles.

  
  


“When you look at me,” Seokmin asks outside the hospital later, sounding half-awake, “what do you see?”

He sees a face like newborn spring, and it hurts a little. He sees someone who can’t lie. He sees a pure warm heart, despite, despite.

“I see you, Seokmin,” Mingyu says. “Just you.”

“Yeah?”

He takes Seokmin’s hand.

“Come on. Let’s go home. I know the way.”

  
  
  
  
  


The end comes two weeks after the letters burn to ash. Sober, across the street from Sig Tau again, Seokmin is staring up at the Phi Delt house from its backyard. Against the dark sky his profile cuts sharp negative space. The end of February is cold and silent. The moon is absent once more, blotted out by the gloom. Nothing has an echo. No one’s inside the house. All the Phi Delts are at the afterparty across the street. They counted faces. 

Mingyu forces his breathing to stay steady. “Okay,” he says. He’s barely audible even to himself. There’s some weird kind of suspense unfurled around them. Feels as if they’re acting out a dream.

“Sorry I made you wait,” Seokmin says.

“It’s okay.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. Of course. These things take time.”

Seokmin's lashes cast soft fringed shadows on his cheekbones. For once he is a body not in motion. For once he is all potential energy.

“You were amazing tonight,” Mingyu says. “Onstage. You were fucking dazzling.”

Seokmin looks at Mingyu, then, that wide-eyed steady radiance in his eyes, like in a previous life he was a deity or maybe a star burning in the sky, and the whole world narrows to him and only him.

“I know,” he says.

It’s become time. He reaches out for the matchbook without another word, pulls a match and strikes it. A sound like a page tearing. The soft yellow glow swimming in his eyes. He lights the black scrap of fabric and then he throws the bottle without pausing at all, without hardly taking a breath.

It slams through a window and inside the gasoline lights up in four diverging lines, brushstrokes of orange and blue, and the newborn flames are small and tame and dim in the belly of the house. Candlelight, hearth fire, building and bubbling. Then they go and go, streaking upwards inside, like shooting stars in reverse. The achy bones of Phi Delt start to chew on the heat. They creak like they’re singing. The fire bleeds, jagged-edge, to the outside of the house.

The smell takes up residence behind their teeth. This is real life, isn’t it? Nightmare and giddy dream all at once. Hurts a little either way, the kind of hurt like your heart pounding too hard in your chest when you look at someone across the room and they’re looking at you and you know what they're thinking and what they want and how much they want it without having to ask. A good sweet kind of hurt. It takes a dizzy short minute and then it's all on fire and it looks like some kind of fucked up celebration.

Flames unfurling from the melting windows like banners, the crumble slow, then everything. A distant wind picks up from the east and billows the smoke right in their faces. The heat is instant and it makes Mingyu's eyes water, and he blinks hard and squeezes them shut. He hears Seokmin murmur something from behind him that he can’t quite make out, and then he feels arms wrapping around him. As if it’s the only thing tethering Seokmin to this world, and if he doesn’t hold Mingyu he will simply float away, up and up and up with the smoke.

When Mingyu opens his eyes again the world shifts and comes into focus slow, like rainwater clearing a path down a foggy window. Seokmin is breathing quiet and calm, almost imperceptible. His arms still like marble. Mingyu leans back into him, against his heartbeat, breathes with him. One creature teetering at the edge of the flames since the inception of the universe, terrified, enticed, beguiled, alive.

Seokmin laughs, a magical sound, light splintering a cloud into a hundred pieces. And even though he wants to, Mingyu doesn’t look at him over his shoulder. He can’t. He’s too entranced by the fire, how it burns when it’s big and hungry as they are, how it curls into strange patterns or slashes through in perfect lines, a kind of transformation. Around it dances a shimmer of pure heat, hovering, almost disappearing. He comes to the realization, watching the orange pulse against the dark, that this is another magic trick.

Every magic trick must have its fourth act. Every action must have its reverse.

Every myth must have its moral.

From the front of the house, across the street, someone screams, _Fire!_

“We have to go,” Mingyu warns, his voice low in his throat, feeling like he is being dragged away from a dream in a different dimension. Seokmin’s arms stiffen around him, almost like he doesn’t want to leave. “We— we have to go.” Mingyu wrenches himself loose. He takes a step, then another step then starts to run, pulling Seokmin with him by the hand.

Then Seokmin lets go, and all of a sudden Mingyu is stumbling forward alone.

Flailing, blind, his exhales sharp stabbing gasps, the stitches springing loose, the street tilting like the world's glue is dissolving and bubbling and everything is sputtering to an awful end, and still he runs, terrified of looking back. Down the long dark corridor of Hell and towards the sliver of waiting daybreak he runs.

And runs.

And knows what comes next before it does— 

“Mingyu.”

From behind him. 

His feet, as if they aren’t his own feet, as if they’re simply the agents of distant myth, come to a halt. His blood and muscle realizing something ahead of his mind. The sirens must be coming close but they’ve gone quiet in his ears.

The loudest sound is his own name and the rushing of his pulse. As if he and Seokmin have started to live at a different frequency entirely.

Stopped mid-motion in the middle of the street like he’s in the old dream. No reason for that. No reason for most things the two of them are and always have been. 

“Mingyu—”

Two lovers with a trail of ash behind them is an ancient and well-known story. He turns and looks at Seokmin, and the pressure in his ears drops like an airplane plummeting.

He sees differently, or sees a snatch of something from another world. Sees no Seokmin and no house on fire but only some kind of god before his pillar of flame and ash, the living colors dancing on behind in the wind. Seokmin is the only source of bright at the birth and death of the universe. The sirens wail like hounds out of hell. Their lights flood slow-motion in nightmare neon, terrible lurid red, red like the lighter, red like blood on white tile, red on the buildings and on the windows and on the street, bright and endless.

Not nearly as bright as Seokmin’s gaze. Impossible to tell whether the fire is the one shedding its light on him, or if he is the one lending his light to the fire. The quickest way to feel alive, Mingyu had said naively. Not knowing that it takes time, and once the flames have caught and spread, you must turn back and look.

Something about that makes him smile. 

Seokmin smiles back.

Push in on his eyes, and they’re saying, no need to take flight, no need. The sirens will lull, the ash will stop snowing, the embers will fade. I’m alive, more alive than I’ve ever been. Do you see it now? I do. Lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

**Author's Note:**

> they're deranged and i love them!  
> [twt](https://twitter.com/sunsburst) n [cc](https://curiouscat.me/sunsburst) <3


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